[Remote] Principal Engineer, AI

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Brightwheel is the largest and fastest growing platform in early education, committed to improving childhood outcomes through technology. They are seeking a Principal Engineer, AI who will drive the technical direction for AI-powered capabilities that enhance business outcomes for schools, educators, and families.

Responsibilities

• Own outcomes end-to-end. Take responsibility for turning high-leverage opportunities into shipped, adopted capabilities with clear measurement, iteration loops, and sustained improvement—not one-time launches
• Define the AI technical direction for your organization. Translate customer problems into a practical strategy, reference architectures, and a roadmap that multiple teams can execute against, with minimal guidance
• Drive build-versus-buy decisions. Recommend when to partner on models and tooling versus when to build differentiated capabilities (data flywheels, evaluation systems, workflow-specific intelligence), backed by evidence from fast, hands-on spikes
• Lead by implementation. Rapidly prototype and ship reference implementations to prove feasibility, de-risk decisions, and raise your teams' expectation for speed and ambition
• Help build the paved highway. Contribute shared foundations—evaluation harnesses, retrieval and context patterns, safety guardrails, observability, and developer experience—so teams can ship reliable AI features repeatedly and independently
• Raise the bar across your organization. Mentor senior and staff engineers, lead design reviews for your teams, help establish standards for quality and safety, and align stakeholders to drive adoption

Skills

• Deep intuition for why models fail, gained from experience that predates the LLM boom
• Experience with model training, fine-tuning, or classical NLP/ML
• 8+ Years of Engineering Excellence
• End-to-end ownership of large, business-critical systems
• Experience launching large-scale and/or highly complex software
• Architectural Strategy experience at the organization level
• Experience designing systems that required execution across multiple teams
• Track record of mentoring senior and staff engineers
• Experience improving skills, knowledge, and ability to get things done
• Proven track record of shipping AI-powered products to production
• Understanding of evaluation, monitoring, and safety in AI
• Experience building tools that allow teams to sleep soundly at night
• Experience earlier in your career with model training, fine-tuning, classical machine learning, or natural language processing
• A portfolio of real work (open-source, demos, writing, talks, or shipped side projects)
• Experience building shared internal platforms or frameworks
• Formal training in computer science (4-year CS degree or equivalent depth in core CS topics)
• A strong bar for operational excellence: secure-by-default design, performance and cost discipline, testability, incident readiness

Company Overview

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